Because geek is cool and clever

Why everyone should have a Google Mail account December 27, 2007

I’m a huge advocate of Google Mail (Gmail), the search giant’s web mail service which I have now been using in preference to every other web- or client-based email application for the past three years.

My two main addresses – work and personal – both feed into Gmail giving me a single place to store and sort all communication. 

I’ve found that other service provider or web-based accounts don’t have anything like the level of intelligent spam filtering that Gmail offers, with it regularly taking out over 100 offers of cheap drugs, watches and other nonsense every day.

That aside, the one killer element to Gmail which makes it impossible for me to switch back to any other email software, is the way it groups correspondence into conversations.

For anyone not familiar with this concept, as you participate in an email discussion with somebody on a particular subject, rather than a flood of new emails arriving with a title that starts RE:, Gmail simply bundles them together chronologically and then shows a number after the sender’s name to indicate how many exchanges there are in that particular conversation. 

I find that some work emails can include multiple contributions from people and all manner of back and forth questions and answers. To have these all bundled into a threaded discussion that you can read as a single flow of correspondence is uniquely useful and I’m surprised that others haven’t copied the idea, particularly as software like Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird include options to highlight similar emails. If they can do this at the click of a button, why not group them together by default? It makes life far easier to organise.

Gmail’s other great draw is that is continually evolving and bringing in new features.

Christmas saw the increase of allowed storage to a huge (and growing) 6GB and we’ve recently had useful innovations with colour coding of categories and a noticably faster interface where a clicked email is displayed almost instantly regardless of internet connection speed. 

Labelling, tagging and now visually colouring discussions based on particular subjects is a geniusly inventive way of assisting with email organisation and I couldn’t be without it.

Integration with Google Calendar and Google Documents is the icing on the cake with more goodies promised for 2008.

Gmail accounts are free and available from mail.google.com. Grab one.